Floridiots

I grew up in northwest Montana where we have a good deal of danger: grizzly bears, mountain lions, avalanches, etc. You learn as a child that you don't feed the bears, you don't build a house at the bottom of an avalanche trough, and so on. Even Roger Miller sang "you don't rollerskate in a buffalo heard"...and was it Jim Croce crooned "you don't mess around with Jim". But here we are, with the sunseeking residents of the peninsula of destruction, Florida, scrambling once again. Floridians have been messing with Charley and soon enough, Frances. The rest of the country is either sympathetic or cynical. I'm taking a cynical tack on this one. How many tropical storms and hurricanes crushing thousands of houses and killing numerous people will it take? How many jammed highways, shortages of water and fuel and plywood, how many Governor Jeb states of emergency declarations, how many international news stories of Floridiocy will it take? I really don't know. It must be so nice the rest of the year in Florida that it makes up for being flattened annually. Now, what I wonder is if these storms have any effect on dimpled and hanging Chads. I guess we'll find out in November.